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In this genuinely uplifting episode of Remarkable World Commentary, Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA welcomes three-time Paralympian Priscilla Gagné, who traces a path from a childhood in Granby and Sarnia, where doctors spent more than two decades cycling through diagnoses before landing on a rare, then-unstudied form of retinitis pigmentosa, to a silver medal in Para judo. Gagné describes a home where she was allowed to scrape her knees and a school system that would not let her run, the two years at W. Ross Macdonald School that taught her to advocate for herself, and the rugby team that made her the water girl and gave her the same ribbons as everyone else. She walks listeners plainly through how para judo classification and weight classes actually work, and is candid that the hardest part of moving to the national training centre in Montreal was not the training volume but the years when almost nobody would partner with the blind athlete on the mat.
The through-line is belief as a discipline rather than a mood. Gagné explains what ninety percent of a fight being mental actually looks like in practice, lyric-free music so the imagery stays hers, fight-by-fight rehearsal, and saying “I want to be here” out loud until she meant it, and describes rehearsing the Rio nerves in an elevator doorway until they lost their grip. She is equally direct about the everyday work of access: drive the car yourself, be patient with people who have never met a blind athlete, and insist on training partners who have both skill and empathy, because either one alone fails. Donna closes by inviting her to speak for her Believing is Achieving initiative, and Gagné shares what is next, a green card, judo and self-defence programmes in American schools for the blind, and a massage therapy certification to carry her through the transition.
TRANSCRIPT
Podcast Commentator: Greetings. Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, and MBA invites you to listen to her bi-weekly podcast, Remarkable World Commentary. Here, Donna shares some of her innermost thoughts, insights, perspectives, and more with her listeners. Donna focuses on topics that directly affect the future of kids, especially kids with disabilities. Donna is a blind advocate, author, sight loss coach, dinner mystery producer, writer, entrepreneur, law graduate, and podcast commentator. She has decades of lived experiences, knowledge, skills, and expertise in access, technology, and information. As someone who has been internationally recognized for her work and roles, she just wants to make things better than possible.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Remarkable World Commentary. I’m Donna J. Jodhan, a lifelong disability advocate and one who sees the world mainly through sound, touch and stubborn optimism. I am a law graduate, an accessibility consultant, an author, a lifelong barrier buster who also happens to be blind.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: You may know me from a few headline moments, as in November of 2010, I won the landmark Charter case that forced the Canadian government to make its website accessible to every Canadian, not just to sighted ones. And in July of 2019, I co-led the Accessible Canada Act with more than two dozen disability groups with equal access into federal law. And most recently, on June the 3rd, 2022, I was greatly humbled by Her Majesty’s Platinum Jubilee Award for tireless commitment to removal of barriers.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: When I’m not in a courtroom or in a committee room or in a pottery studio, you’ll find me coaching kids with vision loss, producing audio mysteries, or helping tech companies to make their gadgets talk back in plain language. Everything I do circles one goal: to turn accessibility from an afterthought into everyday practice. I invite you to think of this show as our shared workbench, where policy meets lived experience and lived experience sparks fresh ideas.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Now, before we jump into today’s conversation, let me shine a spotlight on today’s guest, a changemaker whose work is every bit as remarkable as the world that we are trying to build. I’m very pleased, and I’m very privileged to welcome Priscilla Gagné to our show. Priscilla, welcome to the Remarkable World.
Priscilla Gagné: Thank you so much. Wow, what an introduction. You are incredible. What a phenomenal intro. I love stubborn optimist. I’m going to start using that.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Well, I am sure that you are ready and willing to take up the baton and move on. Okay, so let’s start with the beginning. And Priscilla, I’d love to begin at the very beginning. Take me back to your early years in Granby and Sarnia, and help my listeners to understand what childhood was like for you growing up with retinitis pigmentosa.
Priscilla Gagné: Sure. So my parents didn’t know that I had a vision impairment when I was born. There’s. Sorry. Go ahead.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: I said, oh.
Priscilla Gagné: Oh, yeah. They didn’t know. It took them, I think I was 18 months old when my mom noticed that my eyes were shaking. I guess she was changing my diaper or she was doing something and she was trying to get me to follow her fingers. She was wiggling her fingers and she’s trying to get my eyes to follow her fingers. And apparently I could do it, but my eyes were making like little circles as they were focusing so hard on the movement. And so she brought me into the doctor and they just said, bring me back when I’m older and we’ll get glasses.
Priscilla Gagné: So when I was three we ended up moving to Ontario. But so we were back and forth from different hospitals, Montreal and Ontario. And they said it was a lot more serious than they knew and that I would probably go blind. And at first they thought that it was Leber’s congenital amaurosis. They put me under so many different types of testing because they were wondering, is it a tumor that’s blocking something? They really didn’t know. So I went through a lot, a lot of testing and finally they just said it’s Leber’s congenital amaurosis. Eventually they said it was macular degeneration. And then I went along and rod-cone dystrophy. And then I went many, many years, a good ten years where they just didn’t know. They just didn’t have a diagnosis for me. And it wasn’t until I was probably 25 when a neuro-ophthalmologist and a retinal consultant finally made the discovery that it was a rare form of retinitis pigmentosa that hadn’t yet been studied.
Priscilla Gagné: So that’s why they were a little bit unaware. So childhood with that in mind. So my vision, I had night vision, couldn’t see in the dark. Or if it was dimly lit, I couldn’t follow things. It was too fast or busy. The room was too full of stuff and people, I couldn’t keep track. I couldn’t follow anybody. Little things. Like I couldn’t follow a hockey puck. I couldn’t find toys on the ground. That sort of thing. Couldn’t read anything that wasn’t extremely large, bold print.
Priscilla Gagné: And so but I had a tenacity. I was born with a just wanted grit, you know, I just wanted to do what everybody else is doing and just try to stop me. But I was also extremely shy. So the combination of those two things, me being shy and yet me having this strong desire to belong and to just do what everybody else is doing, kind of clashed. And eventually, because going through school became difficult. At home, I was allowed to do pretty much anything. My parents were divorced. And so my dad, when I go to my dad’s house, he would basically let me try anything with my older brother. You know, safety in mind, but one of the like, you can scrape your knees and you’ll be fine. You’ll figure it out. You know, you’ll learn your limits. But my mom was the opposite.
Priscilla Gagné: Like, you can ride a bike, but you have to wear a shoulder pad. You have to wear knee pads, elbow pads, you know, wrist guards. If she could have wrapped me in bubble wrap, she would have, but love her for it. But in all of that to say, I had no real limits at home. I was allowed to experiment and just be a kid and just try things. And my family was super supportive. Cousins, aunts, uncles. I mean, I had all the support one could dream of, but that all would change when I started school.
Priscilla Gagné: So in school, they didn’t want me running around on the equipment. They didn’t want me doing the Terry Fox Run. I wanted to join the track team and nobody volunteered to guide me and they wouldn’t assign anybody. So I just wasn’t allowed to run. And, you know, fast forward when I turned 14, I went to W. Ross Macdonald School for the Blind and Visually Impaired in Brantford, Ontario. My mom didn’t want me to, and I guess the people from Brantford had tried for many years while I was in elementary school to convince her to let me go to the school, and I didn’t know, she never told me about it. And so my vision resource teacher in the seventh grade, she was telling me, or eighth grade, I think I was in eighth grade. She was telling me about it and I was like, well, this sounds amazing. I want to go check it out.
Priscilla Gagné: You know, I didn’t care that it was residential. I didn’t care that I had to live there for the week and come back. I just wanted to see this dreamland of all things sports, you know? And so I got to go for a tour. My mom came, the vision resource teacher came, my educational assistant, she came, and my grandma and my mom and dad. And so here we came, my little entourage all in different cars. I think we had like three or four cars. And I don’t know why we didn’t just carpool. But anyway we drove about 2.5 hours to Brantford and I got a tour of the school and the residence, what life might look like.
Priscilla Gagné: And man, the gymnasium, they had goalball courts, which I didn’t know about goalball yet. But they had an indoor track which really attracted me, that outdoor track, which really I loved running. They had wrestling mats. So I knew they had a wrestling team, that was intriguing to me. And I just thought, wow, they don’t hold people back here. Like we can just do things. So I was like, sign me up, you know? And much to my mother’s chagrin, I think she cried more than I did when I left. But she knew it was good for me. So she let me go.
Priscilla Gagné: But I only stayed there for two years. I learned all the things I needed to learn, to advocate for myself, to speak up for myself. I met my best friend Whitney there, and she was not a pushover. You know, I learned from her to have a backbone. So I learned how to advocate for myself, but with a little more finesse, maybe, than she might have had.
Priscilla Gagné: But all that to say, I went back to the mainstream system for 11th and 12th grade. And I loved it. I absolutely loved it. I did track and field. I tried out for the rugby team. They wisely let me be the water girl. But what I loved about that whole situation is I tried to hide my vision impairment and thought, I’m just gonna try out like everybody else and see if they notice. And so I tried, but there was a couple things that they were having us do. And I was like, oh, I don’t know if I can do that safely. And so I would just kind of skip over them. But I’d do everything else, all the sprints, everything. And I didn’t know the entire time, they already knew who I was. And they knew that I had a vision impairment. And so they weren’t making me do anything crazy. But then at the end of it all, they put me as a fullback, which to this day, I don’t know what that is. For the tryouts, I didn’t know what my job was. And they’d say, okay, these are the people who are on the team.
Priscilla Gagné: I don’t know if they truly cut anyone, to be honest, but they didn’t just let me sit on the bench and be part of the team and wear the uniform. They found something for me to do and made me part of the team in a valuable way. You know, they gave me the assignment of being the water girl. So my job at every game was, I had about 12 empty, huge, like two litre water bottles that I had to clean out. And they all were in a tray, so I had to clean them all out, fill them all up before every game. And then when they call water, I just had to run towards the sound of water and jiggling all these water bottles, you know?
Priscilla Gagné: And I loved it. And the girls accepted me. Everybody accepted me. When the girls got ribbons for winning stuff, I got the same ribbon. It was just a beautiful thing. I know I wasn’t on the field tackling people or getting the ball, but it was such a special thing that they allowed me to participate in that way. And by the time I graduated high school, I had played multiple sports and had made a goal to go to the Paralympics. And so with the support of my family and the coaches at the right place at the right time, and I think it was divine appointments that happened, I was able to participate in three different Paralympics.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: What can I say? I mean, like you are an advocate. Welcome to the club. I mean, I am very impressed. And, you know, before I came into your life, okay, you had already tried sports such as wrestling.
Priscilla Gagné: And.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Volleyball. What did those early experiences teach you about competition, confidence, and the kind of athlete that you wanted to become?
Priscilla Gagné: Wrestling and cross country running, I think, were the first two that I really learned a big lesson. And it was, music is powerful and it can set your attitude, set your mood. So I learned to become very careful what I listen to, because I don’t think it’s anybody’s secret, I’m a huge Celine Dion fan. So.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Here, here.
Priscilla Gagné: You too. Yeah. And so I would listen to Celine Dion songs. I would listen to different things. But there were certain songs that would just get me up and ready to go. And I just felt like, I’m ready to go. For cross country, there was one that I had in my mind. Do you remember Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers? They had this song, I Won’t Back Down. That song, I was introduced to that after the 9/11 Tribute to Heroes concert. And so that one just kind of really became my heart. And then also there was a song by Celine Dion called A New Day Has Come that she had come out with. And so that one was huge for me because it was like new beginnings. And the song That’s the Way It Is. That was another song of mine. And then the one by Kelly Clarkson. You know, actually she had just won, going back many years now. She had just won American Idol. And so her Breakaway song was playing a lot on the radio. And it’s like those songs are all seasonal for me. They all meant something to me in that season and helped me get in the right mindset for change, or get right in the mindset for the zone to compete in and to be ready.
Priscilla Gagné: Some other lessons was, and one of the biggest, probably life lessons that I learned in that was, you can’t wait on other people for your time. Like you can’t rely and wait and just wait and wait for somebody to come and help you. You just got to get out and do it.
Priscilla Gagné: I remember there was a race and I didn’t know where we were warming up. And my coach, I couldn’t find my coach and I knew the race was coming up. I had two choices. I could either just say, well, I don’t know where the warm up area is. I don’t really even know where to go. So therefore I’m just not going to run. And then, you know, I don’t have to worry about being nervous. Or option two was, you know what? I don’t care how well I do. I don’t care what time I get there. If I’m there before they shoot the gun, I’m racing with everything I have, whether or not I see my coach first. And that’s what I did. I couldn’t find my coach, never did find my coach. I got on the line just at the last second. They were actually upset with me that I was late until I told them I was legally blind and couldn’t find the spot, and they were more compassionate at that point.
Priscilla Gagné: But that decision has followed me through my whole life. Like I don’t wait on other people. If the help is there, fantastic. But I’m not going to allow other people’s behavior, decisions or actions determine my path in life. And I guess I don’t know if I knew that that decision had been made. Like I don’t think I had the words for it at that time, but I remember feeling it in my soul, if that makes any sense.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: And yes, I do.
Priscilla Gagné: Yeah. And I think another important lesson was too is just who you surround yourself with. They’re going to either build you up, your teammates, even on your own team, they can build you up or take you down, or encourage you or discourage you, or make you feel alone or you could feel not alone. But ultimately it’s up to me. Who am I going to choose to hang out with? If there’s nobody positive to be with, then I’m going to put my headphones on and get myself in the game mentally before I ever get out there physically.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: But I think it takes a special person to have those inner resources to move forward. Not many of us do. Not many.
Priscilla Gagné: It’s not easy.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: No, no, it’s not easy to say like, I’m not going to wait for somebody. I’m going to get there. A lot of people are afraid. They’re too shy. They’re not aggressive enough. But in today’s world, that is changing so fast. You got to be able to say to yourself, listen self, I’m getting up and I’m going. And I admire your attitude. I think it’s terrific.
Priscilla Gagné: Yeah. It’s a stubbornness in the best of ways. You know, people think to be stubborn is a negative thing. But I actually think we can fuel that for change and we can fuel it for something very positive in our own lives.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Now, judo was not your first sport. So what was it about judo that truly grabbed you? And when did you first sense that this could become a Paralympic journey rather than simply another athletic challenge?
Priscilla Gagné: I actually entered judo with the Paralympics in mind. And so I was actually on the national goalball team and originally was going to try to aim for the Paralympics with them, but I just really missed combat. Because I was a wrestler, that was my passion for a good five, six years. Well, all through my childhood wrestling with my brother and my cousins, but then competitively on a mat wrestling for a few years. It was my passion. I loved it, and I just missed it. But it’s not in the Paralympics.
Priscilla Gagné: So after a year of being on the national team, and like every national team, there was team drama. There was politics, which is normal for any and every sport. But when you’re super passionate about a sport, like judo definitely got a lot of issues with like lots of drama, lots of, oh my goodness, like emotions high and low and politics and policies. But I’m passionate enough about the sport and I love the sport enough to deal with it. So I wasn’t passionate enough about goalball to deal with it. So I just switched and I thought, you know what? I know there’s judo in the Paralympics and that’s a whole lot more like wrestling. So I switched and I showed up to the YMCA sensei. Because I have a mutual friend who was actually one of my teachers at the blind school and I met him in an airport.
Priscilla Gagné: This is one of the divine appointments, I say. I met him at an airport gate where both B1 athletes, like blind athletes, and we meet at a gate in an airport somewhere that’s not Montreal and flying to different places. And I said, are you still doing judo? He’s like, no, I’m trying goalball. And I was like, oh, I want to try judo. So he gave me his coach, the national coach at that time’s email address, who told me, hey, okay, this is where you live in Sarnia. Go to this YMCA. And there’s a volunteer sensei that can help you. So contact the YMCA, sign up for class, show up. I don’t even have a judogi yet. Like I can’t even put my belt on myself yet. He had to. I’m 23 years old and the coach has to tie my belt for me. Because I never put one on before. And he’s like, so what’s your goal? Judo. Why did you start judo? I looked at him. I’m like, I want to go to the Paralympics. Oh. He laughed at me until he realized I was serious. And he’s like, oh well, okay then let’s start working. So that’s how that all started. Local YMCA and a shout out to all those volunteer sensei’s out there, you know, grassroot level.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Incredible. For listeners who may be hearing terms like B1, J1, weight classes and classification and feeling a little lost, could you walk us through how para judo works and what people often misunderstand about blind and low vision athletes in this sport? And that includes me. Tell me more.
Priscilla Gagné: Sure. So every sport, just to clarify, the B1, J1, M1, M13, just to clarify all of that stuff. All of that is classification based on, for me because it’s vision, it’s vision classification. For people in wheelchairs it would be, I guess, mobility classification. So quadriplegic versus paraplegic versus, you know, like limbs missing versus. So it’s all classification, and so you compete against people in your same classification.
Priscilla Gagné: Now it’s impossible to have two people exactly. Everyone in, say, judo is, J one is fully blind, J two is low vision. So fully blind you might have light reception, but you have no acuity. Low vision, you can still read an eye chart and they use certain measurements. So like with your peripheral vision, they take that into account. For example, I have four degrees of peripheral vision. So I can see contrast. I can see some color. Like I can sometimes make out shapes of people like, hey, that’s a person, because I know intellectually. I can’t tell you their hair color. I can’t tell you what they’re wearing, but sometimes I think, you know, there’s like a short person and I think it’s a garbage can. So to give you an idea of what my vision looks like. And so because I have just four degrees of vision and no acuity, no central vision, I can’t read an eye chart or anything like that. I’m classified as J one.
Priscilla Gagné: So no vision, like blind. J2, you can read the eye chart to a certain degree. And then, you know, people with albinism, it’s really difficult for them to get classed into J2, because for judo especially, they have good and bad days, it’s all dependent on the lighting. So it depends where they get tested. So it’s a thing. So all the J1 athletes compete against one another. All the J2 athletes compete against one another.
Priscilla Gagné: Now you’ll hear different terms like in swimming. It might be S13 or S11 or M11 or S. It’s just the same thing. But because swimming has many more disabilities they have a lot more numbers. Same with track. You could be a wheelchair racer, you could be an amputee racer, you could be a blind racer, you could be a low vision racer. So that’s just to clean it all up and make it super simple. It’s just classification. Like, who are they competing against?
Priscilla Gagné: And then weight class. So for me and judo, we have weight classes. So you don’t put someone who’s my size, I’m a 52kg fighter, against somebody who’s like 90kg. So they do weight classes. So everybody in -52 fights together, everybody in -60 fights together, everybody in plus 70 fights. So it just helps keep it a little bit more safe and fair. So that’s that.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Wow. Okay. And you’ve spoken openly about having only a very small amount of peripheral vision and no central vision. Correct. That shaped the way you train, the way you prepare and trust your body on the mat.
Priscilla Gagné: It’s years of experience. And because I tested my limits as a child, I’m not as afraid. I know what it is to get hurt. I know roughly how long it takes to get healed. To me, I’m not afraid to be hurt. I think if I never was allowed to do anything when I was a kid, I might be a little bit more hesitant. I think it would make me think twice about doing stuff. So I think it’s super important when you’re young. So if there’s parents out there of young people, put them in sports, let them get hurt, let them see it’s not the end of the world. If they get a black eye or break their nose, like it’s fine. They’ll go on.
Priscilla Gagné: But all that to say, what makes it, I guess you can say accessible or like feel like I belong. You know, I really have a hard time now hearing the word inclusion, because I feel like people just use it as a, they just throw it around just to make their company or their organization sound good. But when you look at how do you actually apply that? You don’t see it. Or at least not for people with disabilities. It’s rare. And so but it makes you feel included when, in my case, the coaches and sensei’s in the dojo, when they see you and they make it a natural process of the training to guide you.
Priscilla Gagné: They don’t make it a big deal. They don’t just leave you hanging. They don’t forget about you. Or other students will come and help guide, you know, and they ask questions. You got to be open. Like I had to be open to tell them, okay, this is how you can best help me. You know, let me grab your elbow or just grab my arm. If there’s chaos everywhere, just grab my arm and I’ll follow you. You know, it’s being willing to work with people.
Priscilla Gagné: So number one, I would say the people I’m training with, to make it a positive training, number one, they have to have empathy and compassion. Number two, they have to have skill. If you have skill, but no empathy, I don’t want to work with you. I’m not going to feel very welcomed with you. If you have empathy but no skill, then I’m going to get tired of you pretty quick because with judo, if you don’t have the skill to help me, it’s going to be a very long training. And it’s rare to find both. And so when you can find someone that has both, it changes the entire experience.
Priscilla Gagné: So my coach, Andre, who’s recently retired, he’s like a second father to me. And he was great at that. He had both empathy, compassion and skill, very knowledgeable, gifted man. And he just applied everything. He didn’t treat me different. He applied all the same principles because he was the coach for the National 1996 Olympics. He brought the team to the 96 Olympics. And so then he became our coach. He didn’t treat it any lesser. He treated it the same. He put us through the same rigorous trainings, expectations, all of that.
Priscilla Gagné: And so it’s being wise and knowing my limits too. So when we have a training camp and you’ve got judo people from all over the place that don’t know me and aren’t familiar with people who are blind or visually impaired, and there’s like 200 of them on the mat, I’m probably either going to find somebody who I’m comfortable with to guide me, and I’ll just stick with them off to the side through the whole entire thing. And I’ll select whether I do the fights or not. If it’s a regular training and there’s only like 40, 50 people on the mat, then everybody knows to look out for me and to watch out. And I mean, sure, we bump into each other and accidents happen, but nothing drastic, and it’s just part of training. But I feel safe and secure and in a place where I can just really have no issues with spatial restrictions, you know, like I can just move around freely without the fear of anything. So it’s a beautiful thing. And that’s because of the people around me and my openness to tell them what I can see and what can best help me.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: So I guess it depends a lot on you being, you know, like you driving the car, so to speak. Right? Yeah. Cannot depend on other people to say, oh, okay, she’s vision impaired. Let’s do this for her. It’s a lot of you telling people what you need, how you do it, when you do it, why you do it. Is that correct?
Priscilla Gagné: Yeah. And it’s through patience. Like I have to have patience too. Because, I mean, this is their first time. This able bodied world, their everyday life, they don’t see people with disability. Us, it’s all we know. It’s our whole life, morning till night. You know, it’s all we know. But for them, most of them have never experienced it before. And so it’s not that they’re trying to be jerks. It’s not that they’re trying to be obtuse. It’s just they just don’t know what they don’t know, you know?
Priscilla Gagné: And so it’s up to me to be patient and tell them, hey, you know, can I just get, can you just assign someone to guide me? And if they’re a terrible guide, I’ll be like, yeah, this one’s not really working out. Kind of a different one, you know. And I get it. It’s not easy for everyone to say that. But look, when you want change in your life, you have to make the change. You can’t just wish it upon yourself. So sometimes you got to step out of the comfort zone and be like, hey, I really want to do this, help me do this. And yeah, like you said, drive the car. You just and be patient. Try what they’re doing. See if it works, because maybe they thought of something I haven’t yet, you know? So I try it. I’m willing to try pretty much everything just to see, and they respect that and I respect it too.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: I think this is very, very important is that, you know, we or us as someone who is blind or visually impaired, we have to drive the car. We have to be patient. We have to set the example. And we cannot and must not expect others to know what to do. You know, we are teachers for all of our lives. Is that right?
Priscilla Gagné: Yeah. We’re teachers and students all of our lives. When we stop being one, the world gets much smaller.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah. And the thing is that it’s a lot of stress on us, but we got to learn how to manage it, right?
Priscilla Gagné: Yeah. Absolutely.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: So you once said that, quote, 90% of the fight is about mental preparation. When you say that, what does mental preparation actually look like for you in the days and hours leading up to a major competition?
Priscilla Gagné: That’s a great question because this translates to life too. So in competition, the days and hours and minutes leading up, my mental prep, a certain music. So there’s an artist out there by the name of Travis King and he’s got a song that I love and he’s got an album. There’s no lyrics. And it’s like classical music, but mixed with, I don’t know, like pop or contemporary. Like there’s a beat to it. There’s drums, there’s all kinds of stuff. And I love it because it gives the emotions. It’s almost like when you go to a concert and there’s that music that’s playing, but there’s no words, but it’s like anticipation music. So you can create your own, because if there’s words, then it’s somebody else’s story and you’re putting your mind and your emotions into what somebody else has written. And it’s guiding your mind a certain direction. If you’re listening to music that has no lyrics, then you’re free to create your own mental imagery.
Priscilla Gagné: And so for me, I’m picturing, because I strategize what I’m going to do against this opponent, what I’m going to do against that opponent. And so I’ll pick an opponent for that whole song. I just think about that one opponent. This is what I’m going to do. This is, I know what she likes to do. This is how I’m going to respond. When I’m first to attack, this is what I’m going to do. And if she responds this way, this is how I’m going to respond. So I’m picturing this all in my mind. I’m feeling it in my body. My heart rate actually picks up. You know, I twitch. It’s amazing how connected the mind is to your physical body.
Priscilla Gagné: And then so as days leading up, hours leading up, I go fight by fight. And here’s what I meant when I said that about 90% of the fight is decided already before it even begins. If you don’t believe that you can, you’re not going to. If you show up, and I used to, dreading the competition, dreading the fight, dreading the assignment, dreading whatever, it’s just grueling and long and hard and difficult and the nerves can get to you. And everything’s just amplified. The noise, the lights, the smells, everything’s just amplified and you just can’t wait to be done. It’s like I used to just show up to a competition and just like, I hate this feeling, I wish it could just be over. So that is very difficult to win when you go into a fight like that or into a competition like that. It’s that attitude. It makes it extremely difficult to be successful.
Priscilla Gagné: The day I recognized it, I changed my mind. I’m like, I don’t care how I feel. This is how I’m going to be. And so I started saying, you know, I want to be here. Even though I didn’t physically, I didn’t feel like it. Like I was like that dreading it, you know, that in your belly, like I don’t care if I feel that way. I want to be here. I want this. My opponents are going to eat the mat. I want to be here. I trained to be here. I worked hard to be here, and I’m gonna enjoy it. I would say it out loud and mean it, you know, like make sure, and I said it until I believed it.
Priscilla Gagné: And it got to the point where I started enjoying the competitions and they started getting fast. Like they go by faster. The days weren’t so long, the fights didn’t seem so endless. And when I go into a fight with that attitude, I have a lot more power. I have a lot more energy. It’s amazing how negativity can suck your energy. And when you go into a fight with that kind of negative attitude, it sucks your energy. When you go into it with the positive attitude, it’s like you’ve got boundless energy. So it’s a big difference. It’s a very big difference.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: So you would say that belief plays an important part in the way you tackle things and in your daily life. Would you agree with that statement?
Priscilla Gagné: I do, absolutely. I believe you have to believe in yourself, believe in your abilities, and believe in dreams, even impossible dreams. I mean, me at seven, eight, nine years old would have said it’s impossible for me to be in the, well, I wouldn’t have said it because I didn’t. But somebody could look at my life at that time and say, there’s no way you’re going to go to the games. They won’t even let you join the local track team, for crying out loud. How are you going to go to the Paralympics?
Priscilla Gagné: But I believed in myself to the point that I would be training. I remember running to school, elementary school all the way up. I remember running and timing myself. How long did it take me to run from home to school? And I didn’t give myself permission for like, the old lady with a walker, and I had to slow down to get around them. You know, I’m like, oh, that just means I have to run that much faster to make up that time. So that’s the attitude I went through my whole life until I was 23 or 24 when I was on the national goalball team. And I remember thinking, I’m running and I’d be pushing myself in the gym, and I’m like, because this is what, because I knew this is what athletes do. Olympic athletes push themselves past what they think they can physically achieve. And that’s what makes the difference between an Olympic athlete and a really good track athlete in high school or college athlete. The difference is I’m willing to do something that nobody else is willing to do, and I’m willing to push myself. So that’s what I would do. Even though I was not on a team.
Priscilla Gagné: I had no idea how that day would come. I didn’t know when that day would come, but I would run. I’d push myself because this is what Olympic athletes do. Again, I didn’t know about the Paralympics. So that was my mindset. This is what Olympic athletes do. So this is what I’m going to do. I’m going to be ready, because when that season comes and I find my sport and I find where I’m going to go to the Paralympics or Olympics, then I’m going to be ready. I’m not going to just show up out of shape. I’m going to be ready. And believing in that, you know, from the depth of your soul.
Priscilla Gagné: And if you find it’s a difficult thing to change the way you think, start saying it out loud. And you don’t have to listen to every thought that comes in your head. You know, you don’t have to listen to every negative thought. Well, how are you going to do this? Well, this is what you can tell yourself, to shut up. You know, you can tell your brain, hey, knock it off. I said this, and say it out loud. So you’re hearing it too. Even when I had my vision I used to look in the mirror, I’d look at myself in the mirror, make eye contact with myself in the mirror and be like, you are great. You’re amazing. You’re going to do amazing things. You know your dreams are coming true. And I would look at myself in the eye and say that. And now obviously I can’t see myself in the mirror anymore, but I still have the same attitude. Like I still do self-talk. I still do it.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: I think that you are going to make a perfect guest speaker for an initiative that I have launched. It’s called Believing is Achieving. We’ll talk more about that offline.
Priscilla Gagné: Oh, I love that. Believing is Achieving.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: It’s beautiful, and it’s the only way for you to own your own future. I think you would be the perfect guest speaker.
Priscilla Gagné: Thank you. I’d be honored to be a part of something like that.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Thank you. Now the clock is starting to wind down, but I wanted to ask you this question. Moving to Montreal and training in Canada’s high performance judo environment was a major step. What did that move demand of you? Not just athletically, but personally and emotionally.
Priscilla Gagné: That was one of the hardest moves I’ve ever had to make. Probably one of two. And I love change. I thrive on change. So I was in Ottawa and I was training in a pretty well renowned dojo called Takahashi Dojo. I had become close with everybody there. And one of the coaches was an Olympic athlete in 96. Her name is Nathalie Gosselin. And I had become close with her and she was helping me with everything, like going grocery shopping. When she goes grocery shopping, I’d send her my list too, and then she’d buy it and I’d just e-transfer it, you know, just that kind of thing. So I had an amazing support system and I lived right next to it.
Priscilla Gagné: And I knew Ottawa. I had gotten to know it. I’d been there a couple of years and I had friends. My friend Whitney from high school I told you about earlier, she lived there and her brother, like everybody I had known from goalball, was there. And it was a great life. But I knew I had grown to the point where if I wanted to do well in the Paralympics, I needed to go and train with the national team so I could have more partners, more bodies, because everybody had kind of gotten older and moved away from judo. And so I had to train like the girls. So I had to train with the boys and the younger boys, and then they grew up bigger and it was like, well, now you’re too big for me. And so I was running out of partners.
Priscilla Gagné: So making the decision to move, it was not an easy one. I prayed. I remember, because we were, to give you a little glimpse, we were coming on Thursdays and training Thursday night, Friday morning, Friday night, Saturday morning, and then driving back to Ottawa Saturday afternoon. Training in Ottawa Sunday morning, Monday night, Tuesday night, Wednesday night, and then back to Montreal on Thursday. So I was doing that. I was training seven days a week. And I was getting exhausted.
Priscilla Gagné: And so one of the days when I stayed with Nathalie, she had rented a condo for her son because her son was in judo too. And so I was staying with them and we would walk from her place to judo. I remember praying like, all right, God, if you really want me to be here, if it’s really your will to be here, you need to make it obvious. And I need a place to live right next to the Olympic Centre, because I am not going to try to take a bus and trains. I don’t want all of that. I want to live right next to it where it’s easy. And then on the way, I said that prayer inside my head. I didn’t say it out loud.
Priscilla Gagné: And then when we were leaving judo, we were crossing a street, the last street before the Olympic training centre. And my coach goes, hey, there’s a for rent sign over there on that balcony. And it was an apartment for rent that was facing the Olympic Stadium, which is where we train. And so I was like, oh, and I knew it was my answer to prayer. And I was like, oh, no, that means I have to move.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh.
Priscilla Gagné: But yeah, so I moved and just everything went well as far as that. And then I had to build, and it wasn’t the first time, and it won’t be the last time I had to rebuild a support system, rebuild, like find out where things are. And of course, it’s changing provinces. So the support from the Canadian National Institute for the Blind is different when you’re in Quebec. So you go on to a whole different system. And it was backlogged by three months. And so I couldn’t get orientation and mobility lessons. So I had to rely on sighted people from judo to walk me back and forth from home to judo and back to home again.
Priscilla Gagné: And it really was actually, it was beautiful. And when I look back, it’s like, wow, they really, I didn’t even know these girls and some of these guys. And they just went the extra mile to walk me home. And for the first little bit until I learned how to do it on my own, navigating the metro system was kind of scary because it was trains that have gaps between the buggies.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yes, I know about those.
Priscilla Gagné: Yeah. So that made me nervous. I had to get over it. It took me about three months before I could take the metro confidently and without fear of falling in between, you know, thinking it’s a door and walking between the cars. But yeah, I adapted for sure. And now I can run around Montreal just like the next person.
Priscilla Gagné: And mentally though, the hardest part I think was actually the training. Because physically I could handle it no problem. But mentally it was draining because nobody wanted to work with me. I was different. I was the blind one and there it’s unknown to them. So getting training partners is like pulling teeth. It’s extremely difficult. And it started at the top. The coaches didn’t force or encourage anybody to go with us, so there were nights that I’d be there literally standing. You know, we’d do the warm ups. I didn’t have a partner, so I have to go on the bike. And then when we’d start doing the fight rounds, it’d be like 12 fight rounds. I might have one or two out of 12. So I’m just standing there getting cold. And it was just, oh man, those first like four or five, six years was awful. Right up until 2020 when Covid happened. It was just so discouraging. And it took every mental currency that I had to show up every day.
Priscilla Gagné: And even that day, I remember that, when to try, because again, it was so hard. There were nights I would get completely ready, like winter time, you know, I’d get my snow pants on, have my backpack on my back with all my gear and my cane. I’ve got my tuque, I’ve got my beanie, ready to go. I put my hand on the door handle. I’m like, why am I even going? You know, some days I go anyways and other days I just take everything back off, put it, hang it in the closet and just go snuggle up to my dog, you know, because it was just, oh man, that was a hard season.
Priscilla Gagné: And then the day that I started doing this thing called, I called recreation or reimagine. And instead of me walking into this overwhelming building with like, you know, that I didn’t belong. It was their building. It was their training center that I was trying to fit into or trying to be a part of. And mentally that was where I was coming from. And I decided, you know what? This is my building. This is my home. This is where I train. And so I’d walk in those doors. And as soon as that crushing feeling of like the grandness of the building, it is a little overwhelming at first for anyone, I think. But so when I feel that overwhelming or I feel inferior, or if I was intimidated just by the structure of the building, I’m like, you know what? This is my home. This is where I train and they’re coming to my home. They’re coming to my territory. This is my territory. So I started to own it. And that made it so much easier to get to training every day. And I found after a period of time, I didn’t have to convince myself anymore. Now I walk in and I feel like this is my stomping grounds. This is my home.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: That is right. Courage, commitment. I could go on and on, but I have a last question for you. Sure. Now, Rio 2016 was your first Paralympic Games and finished fifth in the world. Yes. Now, what did Rio teach you that became essential for everything that came after?
Priscilla Gagné: I’m not immune to nerves. I did not know I could get nervous. So I was really shocked because I remember going out for my first fight. Okay, picture this. The stadium is full. And now our international competitions that we go to, there’s hardly nobody in the stands. It’s just a few local people that are there to support the person they know. So the stands are relatively empty. And now we show up in Rio and the stadium is completely full. They sold out the tickets and the crowd is so loud you can’t even hear the coach, you can’t hear nothing. And there’s bright lights. It’s TV lights, there’s cameras. You have to walk up these stairs to get on a stage. So you’re actually on this huge platform is where they put the judo mats where you’re fighting. And so it’s very big.
Priscilla Gagné: And I remember my legs were like heavy and shaking. I remember thinking, I can’t believe I’m nervous. Like I never would have imagined that it could get to me physically. So when I left there, I’m like, that’s never going to happen again. So I started to realize I’m not immune to being nervous. And I need to prepare on how to handle being nervous. And how can I minimize all those feelings of grandiose, like this place, you know?
Priscilla Gagné: And so I started to take that into every competition, to the point, okay, I talk about this a lot, but it really works, to the point where I remember coming back from Rio and getting off the elevator here at the Olympic Stadium to go to the dojo where I trained, the room where we train, and I would picture myself when the doors of the elevator opened and I step out, I would put myself back in Rio. And when they called my name and I’m stepping up to the stairs, I would get all nervous, you know, even though it’s so not my current reality, but mentally I would get there and I would get all nervous. And so I would do it every single time until I didn’t feel nervous anymore. And I would do it randomly. Like any door I walk through could be the elevator, it could be the front door. I would just do it to myself so that I could remind myself and be prepared of those nerves, so that when the time came and they really did call my name, it wasn’t the first time I heard my name called, you know what I mean? So it made a big difference.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: What’s next for Priscilla? Where are you going next? What are you doing next?
Priscilla Gagné: I am currently working on getting my green card application to be able to come to the US and work with other blind athletes, especially with the 2020 games coming up. US gets athletes in every division, so I would really like to help develop some of them. And so I’m competing, you know, and keeping my status as an active athlete so that I can attain that goal of getting the green card and helping. Because, you know, in the States, there’s a school for the blind in nearly every state. And in Canada, we only have like two or three and only one of them is residential. So it’s a huge difference.
Priscilla Gagné: So I thought, how cool would it be to go from school to school and teach self-defense for the blind and teach judo? Like create judo programs or even do inspirational speaking at some of these, to push the kids like, hey, don’t put yourself in a box and believe in the impossible, you know, and try, and you’re smarter than you think and you’re more capable than you think. And so that’s my goal, is to attain that, which I’ll hopefully get this year. I’ve also become a certified massage therapist to help support myself in that transition and to cushion when I switch from professional athlete here in Canada to the States, I’ll be switching income sources as well. So that’ll help with the transition of that. And yeah, that’s pretty much where I’m at right now.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: This has been a very, very motivational interview. And I think that what our listeners will take away from this interview is that, one, believe in yourself. Two, don’t give up very easily. Keep yourself, you can do it and you will do it. And I think for me, like I said, I will be contacting you offline to talk about my own initiative. I think you would be a marvelous, just marvelous motivational speaker.
Priscilla Gagné: Oh, thank you so much. I would love to be a part of it.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: So it was a privilege and a pleasure. And I learned a lot today about judo and wrestling and goalball. Most of all, I learned that I’m not the only one who goes through the same thing or similar thing. You got to conquer your nerve. You got to believe in yourself. Don’t wait for anyone to give it to you. You have to show them that you can do something and then they will believe.
Priscilla Gagné: Yeah, exactly. If you don’t believe in yourself, why would someone else come and try to help you with the goal that you don’t even believe in, you know?
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Absolutely. Thank you very, very, very much. I’ve enjoyed.
Priscilla Gagné: Thank you.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: And we will be in touch with you in the coming weeks.
Priscilla Gagné: I can’t wait.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Good luck to you and I look forward to working with you.
Priscilla Gagné: Thank you. I look forward to hearing from you and working with you too. Have a great day.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: You too. Take care now.
Priscilla Gagné: Take care bud.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Bye bye.
Podcast Commentator: Donna wants to hear from you and invites you to write to her at donnajodhan@gmail.com. Until next time.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA
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Related
Remarkable World Commentary Episode #111: Interview with Priscilla Gagne, Paralympic Athlete, Judo Canada
🎙️ Listen to this Podcast.
In this genuinely uplifting episode of Remarkable World Commentary, Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA welcomes three-time Paralympian Priscilla Gagné, who traces a path from a childhood in Granby and Sarnia, where doctors spent more than two decades cycling through diagnoses before landing on a rare, then-unstudied form of retinitis pigmentosa, to a silver medal in Para judo. Gagné describes a home where she was allowed to scrape her knees and a school system that would not let her run, the two years at W. Ross Macdonald School that taught her to advocate for herself, and the rugby team that made her the water girl and gave her the same ribbons as everyone else. She walks listeners plainly through how para judo classification and weight classes actually work, and is candid that the hardest part of moving to the national training centre in Montreal was not the training volume but the years when almost nobody would partner with the blind athlete on the mat.
The through-line is belief as a discipline rather than a mood. Gagné explains what ninety percent of a fight being mental actually looks like in practice, lyric-free music so the imagery stays hers, fight-by-fight rehearsal, and saying “I want to be here” out loud until she meant it, and describes rehearsing the Rio nerves in an elevator doorway until they lost their grip. She is equally direct about the everyday work of access: drive the car yourself, be patient with people who have never met a blind athlete, and insist on training partners who have both skill and empathy, because either one alone fails. Donna closes by inviting her to speak for her Believing is Achieving initiative, and Gagné shares what is next, a green card, judo and self-defence programmes in American schools for the blind, and a massage therapy certification to carry her through the transition.
TRANSCRIPT
Podcast Commentator: Greetings. Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, and MBA invites you to listen to her bi-weekly podcast, Remarkable World Commentary. Here, Donna shares some of her innermost thoughts, insights, perspectives, and more with her listeners. Donna focuses on topics that directly affect the future of kids, especially kids with disabilities. Donna is a blind advocate, author, sight loss coach, dinner mystery producer, writer, entrepreneur, law graduate, and podcast commentator. She has decades of lived experiences, knowledge, skills, and expertise in access, technology, and information. As someone who has been internationally recognized for her work and roles, she just wants to make things better than possible.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Remarkable World Commentary. I’m Donna J. Jodhan, a lifelong disability advocate and one who sees the world mainly through sound, touch and stubborn optimism. I am a law graduate, an accessibility consultant, an author, a lifelong barrier buster who also happens to be blind.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: You may know me from a few headline moments, as in November of 2010, I won the landmark Charter case that forced the Canadian government to make its website accessible to every Canadian, not just to sighted ones. And in July of 2019, I co-led the Accessible Canada Act with more than two dozen disability groups with equal access into federal law. And most recently, on June the 3rd, 2022, I was greatly humbled by Her Majesty’s Platinum Jubilee Award for tireless commitment to removal of barriers.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: When I’m not in a courtroom or in a committee room or in a pottery studio, you’ll find me coaching kids with vision loss, producing audio mysteries, or helping tech companies to make their gadgets talk back in plain language. Everything I do circles one goal: to turn accessibility from an afterthought into everyday practice. I invite you to think of this show as our shared workbench, where policy meets lived experience and lived experience sparks fresh ideas.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Now, before we jump into today’s conversation, let me shine a spotlight on today’s guest, a changemaker whose work is every bit as remarkable as the world that we are trying to build. I’m very pleased, and I’m very privileged to welcome Priscilla Gagné to our show. Priscilla, welcome to the Remarkable World.
Priscilla Gagné: Thank you so much. Wow, what an introduction. You are incredible. What a phenomenal intro. I love stubborn optimist. I’m going to start using that.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Well, I am sure that you are ready and willing to take up the baton and move on. Okay, so let’s start with the beginning. And Priscilla, I’d love to begin at the very beginning. Take me back to your early years in Granby and Sarnia, and help my listeners to understand what childhood was like for you growing up with retinitis pigmentosa.
Priscilla Gagné: Sure. So my parents didn’t know that I had a vision impairment when I was born. There’s. Sorry. Go ahead.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: I said, oh.
Priscilla Gagné: Oh, yeah. They didn’t know. It took them, I think I was 18 months old when my mom noticed that my eyes were shaking. I guess she was changing my diaper or she was doing something and she was trying to get me to follow her fingers. She was wiggling her fingers and she’s trying to get my eyes to follow her fingers. And apparently I could do it, but my eyes were making like little circles as they were focusing so hard on the movement. And so she brought me into the doctor and they just said, bring me back when I’m older and we’ll get glasses.
Priscilla Gagné: So when I was three we ended up moving to Ontario. But so we were back and forth from different hospitals, Montreal and Ontario. And they said it was a lot more serious than they knew and that I would probably go blind. And at first they thought that it was Leber’s congenital amaurosis. They put me under so many different types of testing because they were wondering, is it a tumor that’s blocking something? They really didn’t know. So I went through a lot, a lot of testing and finally they just said it’s Leber’s congenital amaurosis. Eventually they said it was macular degeneration. And then I went along and rod-cone dystrophy. And then I went many, many years, a good ten years where they just didn’t know. They just didn’t have a diagnosis for me. And it wasn’t until I was probably 25 when a neuro-ophthalmologist and a retinal consultant finally made the discovery that it was a rare form of retinitis pigmentosa that hadn’t yet been studied.
Priscilla Gagné: So that’s why they were a little bit unaware. So childhood with that in mind. So my vision, I had night vision, couldn’t see in the dark. Or if it was dimly lit, I couldn’t follow things. It was too fast or busy. The room was too full of stuff and people, I couldn’t keep track. I couldn’t follow anybody. Little things. Like I couldn’t follow a hockey puck. I couldn’t find toys on the ground. That sort of thing. Couldn’t read anything that wasn’t extremely large, bold print.
Priscilla Gagné: And so but I had a tenacity. I was born with a just wanted grit, you know, I just wanted to do what everybody else is doing and just try to stop me. But I was also extremely shy. So the combination of those two things, me being shy and yet me having this strong desire to belong and to just do what everybody else is doing, kind of clashed. And eventually, because going through school became difficult. At home, I was allowed to do pretty much anything. My parents were divorced. And so my dad, when I go to my dad’s house, he would basically let me try anything with my older brother. You know, safety in mind, but one of the like, you can scrape your knees and you’ll be fine. You’ll figure it out. You know, you’ll learn your limits. But my mom was the opposite.
Priscilla Gagné: Like, you can ride a bike, but you have to wear a shoulder pad. You have to wear knee pads, elbow pads, you know, wrist guards. If she could have wrapped me in bubble wrap, she would have, but love her for it. But in all of that to say, I had no real limits at home. I was allowed to experiment and just be a kid and just try things. And my family was super supportive. Cousins, aunts, uncles. I mean, I had all the support one could dream of, but that all would change when I started school.
Priscilla Gagné: So in school, they didn’t want me running around on the equipment. They didn’t want me doing the Terry Fox Run. I wanted to join the track team and nobody volunteered to guide me and they wouldn’t assign anybody. So I just wasn’t allowed to run. And, you know, fast forward when I turned 14, I went to W. Ross Macdonald School for the Blind and Visually Impaired in Brantford, Ontario. My mom didn’t want me to, and I guess the people from Brantford had tried for many years while I was in elementary school to convince her to let me go to the school, and I didn’t know, she never told me about it. And so my vision resource teacher in the seventh grade, she was telling me, or eighth grade, I think I was in eighth grade. She was telling me about it and I was like, well, this sounds amazing. I want to go check it out.
Priscilla Gagné: You know, I didn’t care that it was residential. I didn’t care that I had to live there for the week and come back. I just wanted to see this dreamland of all things sports, you know? And so I got to go for a tour. My mom came, the vision resource teacher came, my educational assistant, she came, and my grandma and my mom and dad. And so here we came, my little entourage all in different cars. I think we had like three or four cars. And I don’t know why we didn’t just carpool. But anyway we drove about 2.5 hours to Brantford and I got a tour of the school and the residence, what life might look like.
Priscilla Gagné: And man, the gymnasium, they had goalball courts, which I didn’t know about goalball yet. But they had an indoor track which really attracted me, that outdoor track, which really I loved running. They had wrestling mats. So I knew they had a wrestling team, that was intriguing to me. And I just thought, wow, they don’t hold people back here. Like we can just do things. So I was like, sign me up, you know? And much to my mother’s chagrin, I think she cried more than I did when I left. But she knew it was good for me. So she let me go.
Priscilla Gagné: But I only stayed there for two years. I learned all the things I needed to learn, to advocate for myself, to speak up for myself. I met my best friend Whitney there, and she was not a pushover. You know, I learned from her to have a backbone. So I learned how to advocate for myself, but with a little more finesse, maybe, than she might have had.
Priscilla Gagné: But all that to say, I went back to the mainstream system for 11th and 12th grade. And I loved it. I absolutely loved it. I did track and field. I tried out for the rugby team. They wisely let me be the water girl. But what I loved about that whole situation is I tried to hide my vision impairment and thought, I’m just gonna try out like everybody else and see if they notice. And so I tried, but there was a couple things that they were having us do. And I was like, oh, I don’t know if I can do that safely. And so I would just kind of skip over them. But I’d do everything else, all the sprints, everything. And I didn’t know the entire time, they already knew who I was. And they knew that I had a vision impairment. And so they weren’t making me do anything crazy. But then at the end of it all, they put me as a fullback, which to this day, I don’t know what that is. For the tryouts, I didn’t know what my job was. And they’d say, okay, these are the people who are on the team.
Priscilla Gagné: I don’t know if they truly cut anyone, to be honest, but they didn’t just let me sit on the bench and be part of the team and wear the uniform. They found something for me to do and made me part of the team in a valuable way. You know, they gave me the assignment of being the water girl. So my job at every game was, I had about 12 empty, huge, like two litre water bottles that I had to clean out. And they all were in a tray, so I had to clean them all out, fill them all up before every game. And then when they call water, I just had to run towards the sound of water and jiggling all these water bottles, you know?
Priscilla Gagné: And I loved it. And the girls accepted me. Everybody accepted me. When the girls got ribbons for winning stuff, I got the same ribbon. It was just a beautiful thing. I know I wasn’t on the field tackling people or getting the ball, but it was such a special thing that they allowed me to participate in that way. And by the time I graduated high school, I had played multiple sports and had made a goal to go to the Paralympics. And so with the support of my family and the coaches at the right place at the right time, and I think it was divine appointments that happened, I was able to participate in three different Paralympics.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: What can I say? I mean, like you are an advocate. Welcome to the club. I mean, I am very impressed. And, you know, before I came into your life, okay, you had already tried sports such as wrestling.
Priscilla Gagné: And.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Volleyball. What did those early experiences teach you about competition, confidence, and the kind of athlete that you wanted to become?
Priscilla Gagné: Wrestling and cross country running, I think, were the first two that I really learned a big lesson. And it was, music is powerful and it can set your attitude, set your mood. So I learned to become very careful what I listen to, because I don’t think it’s anybody’s secret, I’m a huge Celine Dion fan. So.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Here, here.
Priscilla Gagné: You too. Yeah. And so I would listen to Celine Dion songs. I would listen to different things. But there were certain songs that would just get me up and ready to go. And I just felt like, I’m ready to go. For cross country, there was one that I had in my mind. Do you remember Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers? They had this song, I Won’t Back Down. That song, I was introduced to that after the 9/11 Tribute to Heroes concert. And so that one just kind of really became my heart. And then also there was a song by Celine Dion called A New Day Has Come that she had come out with. And so that one was huge for me because it was like new beginnings. And the song That’s the Way It Is. That was another song of mine. And then the one by Kelly Clarkson. You know, actually she had just won, going back many years now. She had just won American Idol. And so her Breakaway song was playing a lot on the radio. And it’s like those songs are all seasonal for me. They all meant something to me in that season and helped me get in the right mindset for change, or get right in the mindset for the zone to compete in and to be ready.
Priscilla Gagné: Some other lessons was, and one of the biggest, probably life lessons that I learned in that was, you can’t wait on other people for your time. Like you can’t rely and wait and just wait and wait for somebody to come and help you. You just got to get out and do it.
Priscilla Gagné: I remember there was a race and I didn’t know where we were warming up. And my coach, I couldn’t find my coach and I knew the race was coming up. I had two choices. I could either just say, well, I don’t know where the warm up area is. I don’t really even know where to go. So therefore I’m just not going to run. And then, you know, I don’t have to worry about being nervous. Or option two was, you know what? I don’t care how well I do. I don’t care what time I get there. If I’m there before they shoot the gun, I’m racing with everything I have, whether or not I see my coach first. And that’s what I did. I couldn’t find my coach, never did find my coach. I got on the line just at the last second. They were actually upset with me that I was late until I told them I was legally blind and couldn’t find the spot, and they were more compassionate at that point.
Priscilla Gagné: But that decision has followed me through my whole life. Like I don’t wait on other people. If the help is there, fantastic. But I’m not going to allow other people’s behavior, decisions or actions determine my path in life. And I guess I don’t know if I knew that that decision had been made. Like I don’t think I had the words for it at that time, but I remember feeling it in my soul, if that makes any sense.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: And yes, I do.
Priscilla Gagné: Yeah. And I think another important lesson was too is just who you surround yourself with. They’re going to either build you up, your teammates, even on your own team, they can build you up or take you down, or encourage you or discourage you, or make you feel alone or you could feel not alone. But ultimately it’s up to me. Who am I going to choose to hang out with? If there’s nobody positive to be with, then I’m going to put my headphones on and get myself in the game mentally before I ever get out there physically.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: But I think it takes a special person to have those inner resources to move forward. Not many of us do. Not many.
Priscilla Gagné: It’s not easy.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: No, no, it’s not easy to say like, I’m not going to wait for somebody. I’m going to get there. A lot of people are afraid. They’re too shy. They’re not aggressive enough. But in today’s world, that is changing so fast. You got to be able to say to yourself, listen self, I’m getting up and I’m going. And I admire your attitude. I think it’s terrific.
Priscilla Gagné: Yeah. It’s a stubbornness in the best of ways. You know, people think to be stubborn is a negative thing. But I actually think we can fuel that for change and we can fuel it for something very positive in our own lives.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Now, judo was not your first sport. So what was it about judo that truly grabbed you? And when did you first sense that this could become a Paralympic journey rather than simply another athletic challenge?
Priscilla Gagné: I actually entered judo with the Paralympics in mind. And so I was actually on the national goalball team and originally was going to try to aim for the Paralympics with them, but I just really missed combat. Because I was a wrestler, that was my passion for a good five, six years. Well, all through my childhood wrestling with my brother and my cousins, but then competitively on a mat wrestling for a few years. It was my passion. I loved it, and I just missed it. But it’s not in the Paralympics.
Priscilla Gagné: So after a year of being on the national team, and like every national team, there was team drama. There was politics, which is normal for any and every sport. But when you’re super passionate about a sport, like judo definitely got a lot of issues with like lots of drama, lots of, oh my goodness, like emotions high and low and politics and policies. But I’m passionate enough about the sport and I love the sport enough to deal with it. So I wasn’t passionate enough about goalball to deal with it. So I just switched and I thought, you know what? I know there’s judo in the Paralympics and that’s a whole lot more like wrestling. So I switched and I showed up to the YMCA sensei. Because I have a mutual friend who was actually one of my teachers at the blind school and I met him in an airport.
Priscilla Gagné: This is one of the divine appointments, I say. I met him at an airport gate where both B1 athletes, like blind athletes, and we meet at a gate in an airport somewhere that’s not Montreal and flying to different places. And I said, are you still doing judo? He’s like, no, I’m trying goalball. And I was like, oh, I want to try judo. So he gave me his coach, the national coach at that time’s email address, who told me, hey, okay, this is where you live in Sarnia. Go to this YMCA. And there’s a volunteer sensei that can help you. So contact the YMCA, sign up for class, show up. I don’t even have a judogi yet. Like I can’t even put my belt on myself yet. He had to. I’m 23 years old and the coach has to tie my belt for me. Because I never put one on before. And he’s like, so what’s your goal? Judo. Why did you start judo? I looked at him. I’m like, I want to go to the Paralympics. Oh. He laughed at me until he realized I was serious. And he’s like, oh well, okay then let’s start working. So that’s how that all started. Local YMCA and a shout out to all those volunteer sensei’s out there, you know, grassroot level.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Incredible. For listeners who may be hearing terms like B1, J1, weight classes and classification and feeling a little lost, could you walk us through how para judo works and what people often misunderstand about blind and low vision athletes in this sport? And that includes me. Tell me more.
Priscilla Gagné: Sure. So every sport, just to clarify, the B1, J1, M1, M13, just to clarify all of that stuff. All of that is classification based on, for me because it’s vision, it’s vision classification. For people in wheelchairs it would be, I guess, mobility classification. So quadriplegic versus paraplegic versus, you know, like limbs missing versus. So it’s all classification, and so you compete against people in your same classification.
Priscilla Gagné: Now it’s impossible to have two people exactly. Everyone in, say, judo is, J one is fully blind, J two is low vision. So fully blind you might have light reception, but you have no acuity. Low vision, you can still read an eye chart and they use certain measurements. So like with your peripheral vision, they take that into account. For example, I have four degrees of peripheral vision. So I can see contrast. I can see some color. Like I can sometimes make out shapes of people like, hey, that’s a person, because I know intellectually. I can’t tell you their hair color. I can’t tell you what they’re wearing, but sometimes I think, you know, there’s like a short person and I think it’s a garbage can. So to give you an idea of what my vision looks like. And so because I have just four degrees of vision and no acuity, no central vision, I can’t read an eye chart or anything like that. I’m classified as J one.
Priscilla Gagné: So no vision, like blind. J2, you can read the eye chart to a certain degree. And then, you know, people with albinism, it’s really difficult for them to get classed into J2, because for judo especially, they have good and bad days, it’s all dependent on the lighting. So it depends where they get tested. So it’s a thing. So all the J1 athletes compete against one another. All the J2 athletes compete against one another.
Priscilla Gagné: Now you’ll hear different terms like in swimming. It might be S13 or S11 or M11 or S. It’s just the same thing. But because swimming has many more disabilities they have a lot more numbers. Same with track. You could be a wheelchair racer, you could be an amputee racer, you could be a blind racer, you could be a low vision racer. So that’s just to clean it all up and make it super simple. It’s just classification. Like, who are they competing against?
Priscilla Gagné: And then weight class. So for me and judo, we have weight classes. So you don’t put someone who’s my size, I’m a 52kg fighter, against somebody who’s like 90kg. So they do weight classes. So everybody in -52 fights together, everybody in -60 fights together, everybody in plus 70 fights. So it just helps keep it a little bit more safe and fair. So that’s that.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Wow. Okay. And you’ve spoken openly about having only a very small amount of peripheral vision and no central vision. Correct. That shaped the way you train, the way you prepare and trust your body on the mat.
Priscilla Gagné: It’s years of experience. And because I tested my limits as a child, I’m not as afraid. I know what it is to get hurt. I know roughly how long it takes to get healed. To me, I’m not afraid to be hurt. I think if I never was allowed to do anything when I was a kid, I might be a little bit more hesitant. I think it would make me think twice about doing stuff. So I think it’s super important when you’re young. So if there’s parents out there of young people, put them in sports, let them get hurt, let them see it’s not the end of the world. If they get a black eye or break their nose, like it’s fine. They’ll go on.
Priscilla Gagné: But all that to say, what makes it, I guess you can say accessible or like feel like I belong. You know, I really have a hard time now hearing the word inclusion, because I feel like people just use it as a, they just throw it around just to make their company or their organization sound good. But when you look at how do you actually apply that? You don’t see it. Or at least not for people with disabilities. It’s rare. And so but it makes you feel included when, in my case, the coaches and sensei’s in the dojo, when they see you and they make it a natural process of the training to guide you.
Priscilla Gagné: They don’t make it a big deal. They don’t just leave you hanging. They don’t forget about you. Or other students will come and help guide, you know, and they ask questions. You got to be open. Like I had to be open to tell them, okay, this is how you can best help me. You know, let me grab your elbow or just grab my arm. If there’s chaos everywhere, just grab my arm and I’ll follow you. You know, it’s being willing to work with people.
Priscilla Gagné: So number one, I would say the people I’m training with, to make it a positive training, number one, they have to have empathy and compassion. Number two, they have to have skill. If you have skill, but no empathy, I don’t want to work with you. I’m not going to feel very welcomed with you. If you have empathy but no skill, then I’m going to get tired of you pretty quick because with judo, if you don’t have the skill to help me, it’s going to be a very long training. And it’s rare to find both. And so when you can find someone that has both, it changes the entire experience.
Priscilla Gagné: So my coach, Andre, who’s recently retired, he’s like a second father to me. And he was great at that. He had both empathy, compassion and skill, very knowledgeable, gifted man. And he just applied everything. He didn’t treat me different. He applied all the same principles because he was the coach for the National 1996 Olympics. He brought the team to the 96 Olympics. And so then he became our coach. He didn’t treat it any lesser. He treated it the same. He put us through the same rigorous trainings, expectations, all of that.
Priscilla Gagné: And so it’s being wise and knowing my limits too. So when we have a training camp and you’ve got judo people from all over the place that don’t know me and aren’t familiar with people who are blind or visually impaired, and there’s like 200 of them on the mat, I’m probably either going to find somebody who I’m comfortable with to guide me, and I’ll just stick with them off to the side through the whole entire thing. And I’ll select whether I do the fights or not. If it’s a regular training and there’s only like 40, 50 people on the mat, then everybody knows to look out for me and to watch out. And I mean, sure, we bump into each other and accidents happen, but nothing drastic, and it’s just part of training. But I feel safe and secure and in a place where I can just really have no issues with spatial restrictions, you know, like I can just move around freely without the fear of anything. So it’s a beautiful thing. And that’s because of the people around me and my openness to tell them what I can see and what can best help me.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: So I guess it depends a lot on you being, you know, like you driving the car, so to speak. Right? Yeah. Cannot depend on other people to say, oh, okay, she’s vision impaired. Let’s do this for her. It’s a lot of you telling people what you need, how you do it, when you do it, why you do it. Is that correct?
Priscilla Gagné: Yeah. And it’s through patience. Like I have to have patience too. Because, I mean, this is their first time. This able bodied world, their everyday life, they don’t see people with disability. Us, it’s all we know. It’s our whole life, morning till night. You know, it’s all we know. But for them, most of them have never experienced it before. And so it’s not that they’re trying to be jerks. It’s not that they’re trying to be obtuse. It’s just they just don’t know what they don’t know, you know?
Priscilla Gagné: And so it’s up to me to be patient and tell them, hey, you know, can I just get, can you just assign someone to guide me? And if they’re a terrible guide, I’ll be like, yeah, this one’s not really working out. Kind of a different one, you know. And I get it. It’s not easy for everyone to say that. But look, when you want change in your life, you have to make the change. You can’t just wish it upon yourself. So sometimes you got to step out of the comfort zone and be like, hey, I really want to do this, help me do this. And yeah, like you said, drive the car. You just and be patient. Try what they’re doing. See if it works, because maybe they thought of something I haven’t yet, you know? So I try it. I’m willing to try pretty much everything just to see, and they respect that and I respect it too.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: I think this is very, very important is that, you know, we or us as someone who is blind or visually impaired, we have to drive the car. We have to be patient. We have to set the example. And we cannot and must not expect others to know what to do. You know, we are teachers for all of our lives. Is that right?
Priscilla Gagné: Yeah. We’re teachers and students all of our lives. When we stop being one, the world gets much smaller.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah. And the thing is that it’s a lot of stress on us, but we got to learn how to manage it, right?
Priscilla Gagné: Yeah. Absolutely.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: So you once said that, quote, 90% of the fight is about mental preparation. When you say that, what does mental preparation actually look like for you in the days and hours leading up to a major competition?
Priscilla Gagné: That’s a great question because this translates to life too. So in competition, the days and hours and minutes leading up, my mental prep, a certain music. So there’s an artist out there by the name of Travis King and he’s got a song that I love and he’s got an album. There’s no lyrics. And it’s like classical music, but mixed with, I don’t know, like pop or contemporary. Like there’s a beat to it. There’s drums, there’s all kinds of stuff. And I love it because it gives the emotions. It’s almost like when you go to a concert and there’s that music that’s playing, but there’s no words, but it’s like anticipation music. So you can create your own, because if there’s words, then it’s somebody else’s story and you’re putting your mind and your emotions into what somebody else has written. And it’s guiding your mind a certain direction. If you’re listening to music that has no lyrics, then you’re free to create your own mental imagery.
Priscilla Gagné: And so for me, I’m picturing, because I strategize what I’m going to do against this opponent, what I’m going to do against that opponent. And so I’ll pick an opponent for that whole song. I just think about that one opponent. This is what I’m going to do. This is, I know what she likes to do. This is how I’m going to respond. When I’m first to attack, this is what I’m going to do. And if she responds this way, this is how I’m going to respond. So I’m picturing this all in my mind. I’m feeling it in my body. My heart rate actually picks up. You know, I twitch. It’s amazing how connected the mind is to your physical body.
Priscilla Gagné: And then so as days leading up, hours leading up, I go fight by fight. And here’s what I meant when I said that about 90% of the fight is decided already before it even begins. If you don’t believe that you can, you’re not going to. If you show up, and I used to, dreading the competition, dreading the fight, dreading the assignment, dreading whatever, it’s just grueling and long and hard and difficult and the nerves can get to you. And everything’s just amplified. The noise, the lights, the smells, everything’s just amplified and you just can’t wait to be done. It’s like I used to just show up to a competition and just like, I hate this feeling, I wish it could just be over. So that is very difficult to win when you go into a fight like that or into a competition like that. It’s that attitude. It makes it extremely difficult to be successful.
Priscilla Gagné: The day I recognized it, I changed my mind. I’m like, I don’t care how I feel. This is how I’m going to be. And so I started saying, you know, I want to be here. Even though I didn’t physically, I didn’t feel like it. Like I was like that dreading it, you know, that in your belly, like I don’t care if I feel that way. I want to be here. I want this. My opponents are going to eat the mat. I want to be here. I trained to be here. I worked hard to be here, and I’m gonna enjoy it. I would say it out loud and mean it, you know, like make sure, and I said it until I believed it.
Priscilla Gagné: And it got to the point where I started enjoying the competitions and they started getting fast. Like they go by faster. The days weren’t so long, the fights didn’t seem so endless. And when I go into a fight with that attitude, I have a lot more power. I have a lot more energy. It’s amazing how negativity can suck your energy. And when you go into a fight with that kind of negative attitude, it sucks your energy. When you go into it with the positive attitude, it’s like you’ve got boundless energy. So it’s a big difference. It’s a very big difference.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: So you would say that belief plays an important part in the way you tackle things and in your daily life. Would you agree with that statement?
Priscilla Gagné: I do, absolutely. I believe you have to believe in yourself, believe in your abilities, and believe in dreams, even impossible dreams. I mean, me at seven, eight, nine years old would have said it’s impossible for me to be in the, well, I wouldn’t have said it because I didn’t. But somebody could look at my life at that time and say, there’s no way you’re going to go to the games. They won’t even let you join the local track team, for crying out loud. How are you going to go to the Paralympics?
Priscilla Gagné: But I believed in myself to the point that I would be training. I remember running to school, elementary school all the way up. I remember running and timing myself. How long did it take me to run from home to school? And I didn’t give myself permission for like, the old lady with a walker, and I had to slow down to get around them. You know, I’m like, oh, that just means I have to run that much faster to make up that time. So that’s the attitude I went through my whole life until I was 23 or 24 when I was on the national goalball team. And I remember thinking, I’m running and I’d be pushing myself in the gym, and I’m like, because this is what, because I knew this is what athletes do. Olympic athletes push themselves past what they think they can physically achieve. And that’s what makes the difference between an Olympic athlete and a really good track athlete in high school or college athlete. The difference is I’m willing to do something that nobody else is willing to do, and I’m willing to push myself. So that’s what I would do. Even though I was not on a team.
Priscilla Gagné: I had no idea how that day would come. I didn’t know when that day would come, but I would run. I’d push myself because this is what Olympic athletes do. Again, I didn’t know about the Paralympics. So that was my mindset. This is what Olympic athletes do. So this is what I’m going to do. I’m going to be ready, because when that season comes and I find my sport and I find where I’m going to go to the Paralympics or Olympics, then I’m going to be ready. I’m not going to just show up out of shape. I’m going to be ready. And believing in that, you know, from the depth of your soul.
Priscilla Gagné: And if you find it’s a difficult thing to change the way you think, start saying it out loud. And you don’t have to listen to every thought that comes in your head. You know, you don’t have to listen to every negative thought. Well, how are you going to do this? Well, this is what you can tell yourself, to shut up. You know, you can tell your brain, hey, knock it off. I said this, and say it out loud. So you’re hearing it too. Even when I had my vision I used to look in the mirror, I’d look at myself in the mirror, make eye contact with myself in the mirror and be like, you are great. You’re amazing. You’re going to do amazing things. You know your dreams are coming true. And I would look at myself in the eye and say that. And now obviously I can’t see myself in the mirror anymore, but I still have the same attitude. Like I still do self-talk. I still do it.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: I think that you are going to make a perfect guest speaker for an initiative that I have launched. It’s called Believing is Achieving. We’ll talk more about that offline.
Priscilla Gagné: Oh, I love that. Believing is Achieving.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: It’s beautiful, and it’s the only way for you to own your own future. I think you would be the perfect guest speaker.
Priscilla Gagné: Thank you. I’d be honored to be a part of something like that.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Thank you. Now the clock is starting to wind down, but I wanted to ask you this question. Moving to Montreal and training in Canada’s high performance judo environment was a major step. What did that move demand of you? Not just athletically, but personally and emotionally.
Priscilla Gagné: That was one of the hardest moves I’ve ever had to make. Probably one of two. And I love change. I thrive on change. So I was in Ottawa and I was training in a pretty well renowned dojo called Takahashi Dojo. I had become close with everybody there. And one of the coaches was an Olympic athlete in 96. Her name is Nathalie Gosselin. And I had become close with her and she was helping me with everything, like going grocery shopping. When she goes grocery shopping, I’d send her my list too, and then she’d buy it and I’d just e-transfer it, you know, just that kind of thing. So I had an amazing support system and I lived right next to it.
Priscilla Gagné: And I knew Ottawa. I had gotten to know it. I’d been there a couple of years and I had friends. My friend Whitney from high school I told you about earlier, she lived there and her brother, like everybody I had known from goalball, was there. And it was a great life. But I knew I had grown to the point where if I wanted to do well in the Paralympics, I needed to go and train with the national team so I could have more partners, more bodies, because everybody had kind of gotten older and moved away from judo. And so I had to train like the girls. So I had to train with the boys and the younger boys, and then they grew up bigger and it was like, well, now you’re too big for me. And so I was running out of partners.
Priscilla Gagné: So making the decision to move, it was not an easy one. I prayed. I remember, because we were, to give you a little glimpse, we were coming on Thursdays and training Thursday night, Friday morning, Friday night, Saturday morning, and then driving back to Ottawa Saturday afternoon. Training in Ottawa Sunday morning, Monday night, Tuesday night, Wednesday night, and then back to Montreal on Thursday. So I was doing that. I was training seven days a week. And I was getting exhausted.
Priscilla Gagné: And so one of the days when I stayed with Nathalie, she had rented a condo for her son because her son was in judo too. And so I was staying with them and we would walk from her place to judo. I remember praying like, all right, God, if you really want me to be here, if it’s really your will to be here, you need to make it obvious. And I need a place to live right next to the Olympic Centre, because I am not going to try to take a bus and trains. I don’t want all of that. I want to live right next to it where it’s easy. And then on the way, I said that prayer inside my head. I didn’t say it out loud.
Priscilla Gagné: And then when we were leaving judo, we were crossing a street, the last street before the Olympic training centre. And my coach goes, hey, there’s a for rent sign over there on that balcony. And it was an apartment for rent that was facing the Olympic Stadium, which is where we train. And so I was like, oh, and I knew it was my answer to prayer. And I was like, oh, no, that means I have to move.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh.
Priscilla Gagné: But yeah, so I moved and just everything went well as far as that. And then I had to build, and it wasn’t the first time, and it won’t be the last time I had to rebuild a support system, rebuild, like find out where things are. And of course, it’s changing provinces. So the support from the Canadian National Institute for the Blind is different when you’re in Quebec. So you go on to a whole different system. And it was backlogged by three months. And so I couldn’t get orientation and mobility lessons. So I had to rely on sighted people from judo to walk me back and forth from home to judo and back to home again.
Priscilla Gagné: And it really was actually, it was beautiful. And when I look back, it’s like, wow, they really, I didn’t even know these girls and some of these guys. And they just went the extra mile to walk me home. And for the first little bit until I learned how to do it on my own, navigating the metro system was kind of scary because it was trains that have gaps between the buggies.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yes, I know about those.
Priscilla Gagné: Yeah. So that made me nervous. I had to get over it. It took me about three months before I could take the metro confidently and without fear of falling in between, you know, thinking it’s a door and walking between the cars. But yeah, I adapted for sure. And now I can run around Montreal just like the next person.
Priscilla Gagné: And mentally though, the hardest part I think was actually the training. Because physically I could handle it no problem. But mentally it was draining because nobody wanted to work with me. I was different. I was the blind one and there it’s unknown to them. So getting training partners is like pulling teeth. It’s extremely difficult. And it started at the top. The coaches didn’t force or encourage anybody to go with us, so there were nights that I’d be there literally standing. You know, we’d do the warm ups. I didn’t have a partner, so I have to go on the bike. And then when we’d start doing the fight rounds, it’d be like 12 fight rounds. I might have one or two out of 12. So I’m just standing there getting cold. And it was just, oh man, those first like four or five, six years was awful. Right up until 2020 when Covid happened. It was just so discouraging. And it took every mental currency that I had to show up every day.
Priscilla Gagné: And even that day, I remember that, when to try, because again, it was so hard. There were nights I would get completely ready, like winter time, you know, I’d get my snow pants on, have my backpack on my back with all my gear and my cane. I’ve got my tuque, I’ve got my beanie, ready to go. I put my hand on the door handle. I’m like, why am I even going? You know, some days I go anyways and other days I just take everything back off, put it, hang it in the closet and just go snuggle up to my dog, you know, because it was just, oh man, that was a hard season.
Priscilla Gagné: And then the day that I started doing this thing called, I called recreation or reimagine. And instead of me walking into this overwhelming building with like, you know, that I didn’t belong. It was their building. It was their training center that I was trying to fit into or trying to be a part of. And mentally that was where I was coming from. And I decided, you know what? This is my building. This is my home. This is where I train. And so I’d walk in those doors. And as soon as that crushing feeling of like the grandness of the building, it is a little overwhelming at first for anyone, I think. But so when I feel that overwhelming or I feel inferior, or if I was intimidated just by the structure of the building, I’m like, you know what? This is my home. This is where I train and they’re coming to my home. They’re coming to my territory. This is my territory. So I started to own it. And that made it so much easier to get to training every day. And I found after a period of time, I didn’t have to convince myself anymore. Now I walk in and I feel like this is my stomping grounds. This is my home.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: That is right. Courage, commitment. I could go on and on, but I have a last question for you. Sure. Now, Rio 2016 was your first Paralympic Games and finished fifth in the world. Yes. Now, what did Rio teach you that became essential for everything that came after?
Priscilla Gagné: I’m not immune to nerves. I did not know I could get nervous. So I was really shocked because I remember going out for my first fight. Okay, picture this. The stadium is full. And now our international competitions that we go to, there’s hardly nobody in the stands. It’s just a few local people that are there to support the person they know. So the stands are relatively empty. And now we show up in Rio and the stadium is completely full. They sold out the tickets and the crowd is so loud you can’t even hear the coach, you can’t hear nothing. And there’s bright lights. It’s TV lights, there’s cameras. You have to walk up these stairs to get on a stage. So you’re actually on this huge platform is where they put the judo mats where you’re fighting. And so it’s very big.
Priscilla Gagné: And I remember my legs were like heavy and shaking. I remember thinking, I can’t believe I’m nervous. Like I never would have imagined that it could get to me physically. So when I left there, I’m like, that’s never going to happen again. So I started to realize I’m not immune to being nervous. And I need to prepare on how to handle being nervous. And how can I minimize all those feelings of grandiose, like this place, you know?
Priscilla Gagné: And so I started to take that into every competition, to the point, okay, I talk about this a lot, but it really works, to the point where I remember coming back from Rio and getting off the elevator here at the Olympic Stadium to go to the dojo where I trained, the room where we train, and I would picture myself when the doors of the elevator opened and I step out, I would put myself back in Rio. And when they called my name and I’m stepping up to the stairs, I would get all nervous, you know, even though it’s so not my current reality, but mentally I would get there and I would get all nervous. And so I would do it every single time until I didn’t feel nervous anymore. And I would do it randomly. Like any door I walk through could be the elevator, it could be the front door. I would just do it to myself so that I could remind myself and be prepared of those nerves, so that when the time came and they really did call my name, it wasn’t the first time I heard my name called, you know what I mean? So it made a big difference.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: What’s next for Priscilla? Where are you going next? What are you doing next?
Priscilla Gagné: I am currently working on getting my green card application to be able to come to the US and work with other blind athletes, especially with the 2020 games coming up. US gets athletes in every division, so I would really like to help develop some of them. And so I’m competing, you know, and keeping my status as an active athlete so that I can attain that goal of getting the green card and helping. Because, you know, in the States, there’s a school for the blind in nearly every state. And in Canada, we only have like two or three and only one of them is residential. So it’s a huge difference.
Priscilla Gagné: So I thought, how cool would it be to go from school to school and teach self-defense for the blind and teach judo? Like create judo programs or even do inspirational speaking at some of these, to push the kids like, hey, don’t put yourself in a box and believe in the impossible, you know, and try, and you’re smarter than you think and you’re more capable than you think. And so that’s my goal, is to attain that, which I’ll hopefully get this year. I’ve also become a certified massage therapist to help support myself in that transition and to cushion when I switch from professional athlete here in Canada to the States, I’ll be switching income sources as well. So that’ll help with the transition of that. And yeah, that’s pretty much where I’m at right now.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: This has been a very, very motivational interview. And I think that what our listeners will take away from this interview is that, one, believe in yourself. Two, don’t give up very easily. Keep yourself, you can do it and you will do it. And I think for me, like I said, I will be contacting you offline to talk about my own initiative. I think you would be a marvelous, just marvelous motivational speaker.
Priscilla Gagné: Oh, thank you so much. I would love to be a part of it.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: So it was a privilege and a pleasure. And I learned a lot today about judo and wrestling and goalball. Most of all, I learned that I’m not the only one who goes through the same thing or similar thing. You got to conquer your nerve. You got to believe in yourself. Don’t wait for anyone to give it to you. You have to show them that you can do something and then they will believe.
Priscilla Gagné: Yeah, exactly. If you don’t believe in yourself, why would someone else come and try to help you with the goal that you don’t even believe in, you know?
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Absolutely. Thank you very, very, very much. I’ve enjoyed.
Priscilla Gagné: Thank you.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: And we will be in touch with you in the coming weeks.
Priscilla Gagné: I can’t wait.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Good luck to you and I look forward to working with you.
Priscilla Gagné: Thank you. I look forward to hearing from you and working with you too. Have a great day.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: You too. Take care now.
Priscilla Gagné: Take care bud.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Bye bye.
Podcast Commentator: Donna wants to hear from you and invites you to write to her at donnajodhan@gmail.com. Until next time.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA
Global Leader In Disability Rights, Digital Accessibility, And Inclusive Policy Reform
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